Talking landscapes

Abstract

Catherin Bull has just published the first overview of Australian Landscape Architecture. Julian Raxworthy reviews the volume and suggests further research directions to build on this work.-----

For Australian landscape architecture, the relationship between design projects and their indigenous setting has long been the most significant (and often, only) intellectual question. This preoccupation was best put by Bruce Mackenzie, one of the main innovators in the industry, in 1966 when he noted “a unique opportunity exists for achieving a cohesive and powerful theme for landscape design throughout this country by realising and promoting the potential of the indigenous environment”. Since that time, most celebrated landscape projects have attempted in some way to address this challenge. Harmony and appropriateness have become the twentieth-century Australian equivalent of “taste” in eighteenthcentury discourse on the Picturesque.-----

Catherin Bull’s recent book New Conversations with an Old Landscape brings together a range of projects that address this preoccupation. It is also the first major collection of Australian landscape architecture projects in book form – something that local landscape architecture culture has been waiting a long time for. This puts a tremendous pressure on the book: as the first of its kind it must be comprehensive, while also articulating its own curatorial intention of documenting projects with a very specific type of relationship to places.-----

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